


Of Nodes and Layers

by orichan



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, The Last Jedi
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Enemies to Friends, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Movie: Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-23
Updated: 2018-02-23
Packaged: 2019-03-22 13:51:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13765494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orichan/pseuds/orichan
Summary: When a working prototype of their instant translation earbuds was the only thing that could save Leia's Silicon Valley start-up, Resistance, from a hostile takeover by the big bad multi-technology company, First Order, Rey went to retired MIT Professor Luke Skywalker for machine learning help.It soon became disturbingly clear that fate had a funny sense of humor and everything led back to Rey's least favorite person: Kylo Ren, the naughty nephew of Luke, estranged son of Leia and Han, and unsociable chief of R&D at First Order.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [justrandome](https://archiveofourown.org/users/justrandome/gifts).



**Resistance to be the next First Order Acquisition?**

First Order (NYSE: FIRO, NASDAQ: FIROR), American multi-technology company, is rumored to be in talks to acquire Resistance, a Silicon Valley startup that has provided instantaneous text and audio translation between 50 languages since its inception in 2014. Resistance is the brain child of Leia Organa, heiress of entrepreneur dynasty. Bolstered by a robust collection of patented deep learning technologies, Resistance boasts a 30% higher accuracy rate from translation between Indo-European languages and 50% higher accuracy from Sino-Tibetan languages to Indo-European languages compared to their top competitors.

According to a person close to the negotiation, similar to other recent acquisitions, First Order is interested in applying Resistance IP on its defense and security offerings, and plans to shut down Resistance’s consumer product line once the acquisition is closed.

Despite being named startup of the year in 2014 by Tech.Co, Resistance recently lost 50% of its valuation due to plateauing sales and ad revenue from its app, continual development delays on their wireless translator earbuds, and the scandal surrounding one of its major investors, Han Solo.

Solo was the founder of The Falcon, the world’s most popular media sharing site until its closure six months prior when he was charged and convicted of operating an illicit file-sharing service where pirated movies and other material was traded. He is currently serving a 1.5 years jail sentence and has an unrelated hacking charge currently pending trial date. Solo has maintained he was innocent of the hacking charges, that his computer was remotely controlled.

* * *

Rey Smith checked her phone for the third time to make sure she didn’t misread Google Map. The old, borderline decrepit house in front of her wasn’t what she had expected. She checked the address in Chewie’s e-mail one more time, walked up to the street sign to make sure she wasn’t on the wrong street, and quadruple checked the house number before she worked up her courage to approach the door.

In many ways, she being where she was still felt so surreal. Two years ago, when she started her job at Resistance, she would have laughed at whoever suggested that the job would one day lead her to the doorstep of Luke Skywalker, the legendary machine learning researcher she had idolized ever since she had gotten into the field, but here she was.

She would probably be fangirling much harder if the circumstances were less dire. But she had no time to waste; their investors had threatened to cash out through First Order if they don’t produce a working demo for their wireless translation earbuds in three weeks. They had gotten the hardware and app side code ready, but despite their best efforts, they couldn’t compress her deep neural network enough to fit in the earbuds for continuous learning. Rey didn’t like to admit defeat, but she had to concede she was running out of ideas, they were running out of time, and Luke was really their only hope.

She took a deep breath. There was no doorbell to be seen, so she used the old fashion knocker on the door instead.

The fifth time she knocked the door opened and an old man with white grey beard peaked grumpily out from the other side, the chain the door was still in. “What do you want?”

“Professor Skywalker?” Rey was so nervous she could barely keep a smile on her face. “I’m Rey Smith, lead developer at Resistance. Your sister, Leia, sent me. We need your help.”

Luke’s answer came like a splash of the coldest water. “Go away.”

* * *

There was no phone signal where Luke was, so she drove 35 minutes to the closest town for barely passable cell reception. She sent a few e-mails to update Poe and Leia on her trip. The signal was too weak for anything data demanding, so she decided to text Finn instead of Skyping him as she had promised.

He had gotten a new number recently when someone stole his phone, and with all the chaos happening in the past couple weeks, she forgot to add it into her contact list. She entered his new number in the send field, and sent him a few quick messages: 

> _Sorry I didn’t contact you earlier. I couldn’t get on any connection until now. [Today, 1:21pm]_
> 
> _I’ve found Luke Skywalker but he didn’t want to talk to me. [Today, 1:22pm]_
> 
> _I won’t give up so easily though. [Today, 1:23pm]_

Then, she put her phone away, pulled out her laptop, and started tinkering with her code.

* * *

If you ask Finn what’s so bad about First Order, be prepare to listen for five hours. That’s how disgruntled Finn is with his former company.

Finn hated First Order’s perform-or-else culture, the top-down hierarchy, their products, their clients, his coworkers, but most of all, he hated Kylo Ren. Ren wasn’t actually his boss, but Ren had final decision over the R&D portfolio, and he cancelled the project Finn was on after Finn had put in a full year of unpaid overtime because he said it was “not innovative enough” and did not “fit with his vision.”

It was their mutual dislike of Kylo Ren that first connected Rey to Finn.

She was at her first Resistance Friday beer bash and he was explaining how Ren was so infamous for his temper and vicious take downs that his last name had became a verb amongst people working in the First Order R&D department. People would say, “I’ve been Renned” when they got yelled at by the chief of R&D. With a wry smile, Rey joined in the conversation and told Finn about how she had overheard Ren calling her presentation "only bearable" at a recent machine learning conference. Finn joked that was probably Ren's shit version of a complement, and from that moment on, they were best friends.

* * *

If there was one thing she learned from the bad cards she had been dealt with in life it was that persistence more often than not wins battles.

So she was back at the old house again the next day with a slightly different tactic.

She had heard from Han before his arrest that Chewie was Luke’s close friend, so she had him on skype when she knocked on the door the next day.

“Do I need to call the police? Didn’t I tell you to go—” Luke broke off when he noticed the person on the screen of her phone.

“Chewie?”

Rey took that as encouragement and offered him her phone. “He has a message for you.”

Luke took the phone wordlessly, his eyes focused on the signs Chewie was making with his hands.

“I’m not going back,” he said when Chewie stopped, drawing out every word in an exaggerated way to make sure Chewie could read his lips. “How did you find me anyway?”

Chewie grunted in exasperation and signed a long response.

“The Falcon?” Luke finally looked up at Rey. “Wait, where’s Han?”

Rey couldn’t believe her ears.

* * *

It was only 10:30am, but Luke was on his third glass of whiskey when Rey finished telling him about Han’s arrest and everything that led up to that moment.

Rey had thought Luke was joking when he had first asked about Han. The arrest and trial of Han, the personification of web content freedom, was all over both traditional and online news media. For or against, everyone had an opinion. The only way Luke could have missed it all was if he lived under a proverbial rock. But apparently, that was exactly what Luke did.

It was painful speaking of Han. Han was, of course, the one investor of Resistance that truly believed in its cause and was willing to invest blindly, but she liked to think her connection with the man went deeper than that, that he was also the father she never had. Han had been supportive of her work ever since that time she met him at Def Con five years ago, and when she graduated two years ago, he introduce her to Leia and (she suspected) got her a job at Resistance.

The conversation, inevitably, landed on Han and Leia’s son, Kylo Ren, chief of R&D lab at First Order. Rey had often wondered how two amazing people like Han and Leia could create a creature like Ren, so hell bent on standing against everything his parents stood for and dismantling everything they had worked so hard to create. It made her angry that he had parents that loved him but threw them away like garbage. Rey knew Ren was Luke’s nephew, but she didn’t bother to hide her disdain for the man who had testified against his own father at the trials, the man leading the First Order hostile takeover.

“Kylo Ren will control The Resistance’s patents within weeks if we can’t get the prototype working. Our patents were meant to bring people together in a world without language boundaries, not shady government surveillance and military espionage that First Order is infamous for. We need your help. We need Luke Sky—”

“You don’t need Luke Skywalker.”

His blunt denial stung. Emotions already running high from retelling Han’s story, she snapped at him before she could stop herself. “Did you hear what I just said?”

Luke finished his drink and glared at her. “You think what?” he barked, and Rey grimaced at the saliva that landed on her arm. “That I can solve your little programing problem and suddenly your investors will never consider letting First Order acquire Resistance again? What would you have me do? Fly back out to San Francisco, sit my naughty nephew in a chair, and force him to listen to a lesson in business ethics? What did you think would happen?”

“I didn’t come out to the middle of the Colorado Rockies for no reason,” Rey cried. She could feel her anger and frustration rising steadily as she stood her ground. “I’m not leaving until you help."

* * *

The first time Rey interacted with Kylo Ren was Def Con five years ago.

Ren was a speaker at the conference that year. There was a lot of buzz surrounding his session, partly because First Order was a household name in the security technology world, partly because Ren had a reputation as one of the top security and machine learning experts in the world, and partly because Ren almost never spoke in public. Rey wasn’t particularly interested in the topic, but she had heard so many people talking about the session she decided to attend just so no one could say she missed out.

The first impression Rey had of Ren was that he looked like he hated the world. His eyes had a constant look between boredom and annoyance, his face had a permanent scowl, and not once did he smile in the session. She didn’t quite understand why the room was full of his admirers since he was so uncharismatic until he started speaking.

He was brilliant. The material he presented and live demo he conducted to show how to apply machine learning to heuristically solving NP-Complete security problems had given her so many fruits for thoughts, she actually started to take notes. She was quickly becoming a fan until the Q&A section of the session begun.

That was when her impression of him rapidly turned south.

He was extremely abrasive in his answers and condescending to people he felt was beneath his intelligence, which seemed to be everyone. The final stroke came when a girl standing close to Rey finally found her courage to ask a question about the pros and cons of using supervised and unsupervised learning for malware classification.

Admittedly, even Rey didn’t think it was a good question, but Rey had always thought there was a right way of answering a question and a wrong way of answering a question.

And Ren’s answer to the question was very, very wrong.

“There’s this very nice tool called Google that can tell you the answer to that. I suggest you use it,” he said, so harsh and brutally blunt, Rey winced.

The girl burst into tears, and from that moment on, Rey had determined Kylo Ren was an insufferably, unfeeling asshole with no absolutely no redeeming qualities.

* * *

Rey followed Luke to the one supermarket within a 10 mile radius in her rented car, watched him buy a few rather unappetizing frozen pizzas, a carton of eggs, and some apples.

“That’s not very healthy,” she commented, when she waited behind him at the cash register line.

“It’s none of your business,” Luke muttered and threw a few chocolate bars into his basket just to make a point. “Also, stop following me.”

“You know I can’t do that,” Rey replied with equal stubbornness, as she followed Luke out of the door.

She was about to get into her car and follow Luke back to his house when Luke stopped abruptly and turned toward her. “Why are you here?”

“Resistance sent me.”

Luke looked more annoyed than usual. “You know that’s not what I’m asking. Why did they send you?”

She wasn’t entirely sure either, to be honest, but she suspected Leia was hoping her area of study would make it easier for her to connect with Luke. She shrugged. “They sent me because I wrote my PhD dissertation on convolution neural network.”

Luke put his groceries on the floor and crossed his arms. “What school did you get your degree from?”

“Nowhere.”

“Leia wouldn’t hire someone from nowhere as a head developer.”

“I graduated from University of Victoria in Canada.”

“Alright, that’s pretty much nowhere.”

Rey smiled self-depreciatively. Compared to MIT and the Ivy League schools that Luke Skywalker had graduated from and taught at, her local university with its tiny and non-noteworthy computer science program must be nowhere. Still, the idealized image she had of Luke Skywalker, the benevolent hero, was getting chipped away by the second. “Doesn’t matter,” she said between gritted teeth, “I know I’m good at what I do, and I’m still not leaving until you agree to help us.”

“Why are _you_ here, Rey?” Luke looked at her with penetrating eyes. “It wasn’t fully altruistic, was it?”

Rey didn’t see any point in lying, so she simply told the truth. “I’ve gotten my deep neural network as far as I could alone. I need another pair of eyes, another opinion, new ideas. I heard from Maz Kanata about the research you were working on before you left MIT, and I thought…”

His response was disappointing and immediate. “You want an advisor for your research, but I can’t teach or advise you.”

Rey, having grown up alone and underprivileged, was used to being rejected, but the rejection from a professor she had respected for so long felt like a slap. She took half a step back and swallowed thickly. “Why not? You aren’t exactly busy.”

“I’ll never touch machine learning ever again. I moved out to these mountains to retire. Machine learning is bad for the world.”

“Why?” Rey had put too much of her hopes and dreams into the trip to let him off the hook so easily. He might not care about her feelings, but she knew he cared enough about Leia’s. “Leia sent me here with hope. If she was wrong about you, then she deserves to know why.”

To that, Luke had the decency to look guilty.

* * *

She checked her Stack Overflow account just when the coffee shop asked for last call.

The question she had posted three weeks ago when she first hit the issue remained unanswered. She brushed away her disappointment. It was a long shot anyway. Her question was very specific and an answer required in-depth convolution neural network that few people in the world had. She had only posted the question because writing everything out helped her work through the problem.

At least that’s what she told Finn and Rose. 

There was another reason, one so silly and wishful she could barely admit to herself: She had hoped a specific contributor would answer her question, like he did when she posted questions as an undergrad all those years ago. She had a feeling he would know the answer. That cheeky bastard, who inspired her to change her major to machine learning, always seemed to know the answer. 

It was simply too bad _SoloCodeTechnican_ had been inactive for the last eight years.

* * *

Rey was in the middle of setting up camp on public land just across from Luke’s front yard, when Luke walked out to her.

He handed her a piece of paper with an e-mail scribbled on it. “Send me what you have on your research to this e-mail. Starting tomorrow, I will be your research advisor for three days and show you why this is all a foolhardy pursuit.”

* * *

Luke took pity on her and let her connect to his satellite internet connection. The signal was too weak for anything more data demanding than email and chats, so she decided to contact Finn through WhatsApp. She knew Finn talked with his family through WhatsApp, so he must have an account.

She searched for his contact and found him with the profile picture of a black jet fighter in storm clouds. How fitting. One of Finn’s favorite user name is “stormpilot”. 

> _No phone signal here, so I’m switching to Whatsapp. [3:45pm]_
> 
> _Good news: Luke has agreed to look at my deep neural network and advise me on the problems. Bad news: He only agreed to help for three days. [3:45pm]_

She didn’t think Finn would reply right away, but a few minutes later her phone lit up with a message alert.

> _Are you sure he can help you with your research? [3:49pm]_
> 
> _He hasn’t been in the field for over eight years [3:49pm]_
> 
> _Machine learning had changed a lot in the last few years. [3:50pm]_
> 
> _That’s true, but I think maybe his old school algorithm ideas may help. [3:52pm]_
> 
> _Not as much as long short-term memory trained on iterative gradient descent will. [3:52pm]_

A foreboding feeling crept upon her. Something wasn’t quite right. Finn was one of the best app and UX designers she had ever met, but he was no machine learning expert. He tolerated her rant about machine learning well enough, but he had never bothered to actually learn what any of her technical terms actually meant...

> _Wait, you’re not Finn. [3:54pm]_
> 
> _Who am I talking to? [3:54pm]_
> 
> _Kylo Ren. [3:56pm]_

Rey almost dropped her phone when the last message showed up. Her eyes drifted to the phone number she had associated with Finn. She must have misentered the number yesterday. It was off by one digit. She cursed, before she reminded himself that the chances of the Kylo Ren’s phone number being just one digit off of Finn’s was about as high as if she had happened to message someone else with Kylo Ren’s name. Her hands were shaking when she typed, but she had to know.

> _Kylo Ren from First Order? [3:58pm]_
> 
> _There’s no other Kylo Ren in our field, Rey Smith from Resistance. [4:00pm]_
> 
> _You need a teacher. I can teach you. [4:00pm]_
> 
> _Go fuck yourself, you monster. I never want to be taught by someone like you. [4:01pm]_

But whatever satisfaction she might have felt from typing the crude insult was short lived. Ren had no desire to give her the last word.

> I'm a monster, but I’m also right. You will see. [4:02pm]

* * *

She had managed to mostly wipe Kylo Ren out of her mind the next morning when she knocked on Luke’s door at 8:00am.

Luke was as sullen as she had found him the day before but this time he opened the door for her and waved her in. “Let’s get started.”

His computer was up and running on the dining table. “I’ve read the material you’ve sent me. What do you know about support vector machines?”

Rey had learned about SVMs in her graduate classes, but she never studied them in detail because she had always thought unsupervised learning models were more practical. “I know they are supervised learning models with associated learning algorithms that analyze data used for classification and regression analysis. I know they typically suffer from drawbacks concerning the choice of the kernel, low speed, high algorithmic complexity, and intense memory requirements”

“Impressive,” Luke replied drily, “Every word in that sentence was wrong.”

He sat down in front of his computer, opened a command line module, and opened Vim. “SVMs can outperform most algorithm in number of benchmark tests.  You people always think new things are better, but SVM is one of the most efficient learning machine with excellent generalization capacity when it’s implemented correctly.”

He stretched his fingers and then started coding. “Watch and learn.”

* * *

The promising start turned out to be exactly that: a start.

SVMs did improve on efficiency but it also took away from flexibility. This in itself was expected, but what she didn’t expect was just how much she had to fight Luke on some of the newer machine learning concepts and thinkings that had been proven true in the last few years.

“Why would you use rectifier function here? You didn’t even consider alternatives.”

Luke was a mix of condescension and old man grumpiness. It was tiring working with him even though he really knew a lot and she was grateful for his teachings. To make matter worse, it was 8pm, her brain was mush from 12 hours of working, and Rey was grasping her last straw. “If you had not shut yourself off from the machine learning community for eight years you would know that rectifier function is much more efficient than softplus function.”

Luke instantly tensed at her words and Rey realized instantly whatever she said was probably not what she was supposed to say to an advisor.

“You think you know everything.”

“That wasn’t what I meant. We are so close to a breakthrough,” she told him. Under Luke’s intense stare, she found herself rambling. “I just wanted to get to the actual problem. It’s not the rectifier function, I think maybe it’s how we determined the variables, or maybe the way we supervised the SVMs, or—”

Luke interrupted her before she could continue. “I’ve seen talent like yours only once, in Ben Solo.”

It took a moment for Rey to connect Ben Solo as Kylo Ren’s birth name. It wasn’t the first time Rey had heard the comparison, but it felt different coming from Luke’s lips. While others were simply making the comparison because of the impact of her research on the broader machine learning community (because as much of a bastard as Ren was, Rey had to begrudgingly admit he was sharp based on the few times he actually shared his work with the world), Luke seemed to be pointing at something different.

He stood up and poured himself a glass of whiskey. “It didn’t scare me enough then,” he said as he sipped his drink, his eyes never leaving hers. “It does now. I can’t be your advisor after all.”

And with that, Luke Skywalker retreated, motioning for her to leave.

* * *

The proudest moment of Rey’s life wasn’t being one of the youngest women to successfully defending her PhD thesis at her university, or being named one of the top 10 young genius that shaking up science today by Popular Science. It was besting Ren in a Kaggle challenge on predicting the NCAA outcome.

The best part of it all was his look of dismay when he realized he had lost, and she got to see it clearly because they happened to be watching the championship game at the same sport bar at Mountain View.

The second best part was listening to a man (who she later found out was Snoke, the First Order’s CEO) mock and belittle Ren for being bested by a girl so much younger and less experienced than he.  

The delivery was so savage and vicious, she almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

* * *

She drove back into town to pick up hot dinner in a scruffy diner. It was that or Taco Bell and McDonalds and Rey hated both. She ordered beer to wash down the greasy burger and fries, before letting herself go and ordered two more. Luke’s final words replayed in her head like a broken record. She wanted to stay positive, but she couldn’t help but feel a little hopeless when Luke was so clear about his lack of intention in continuing his lessons.

The negative thoughts continued to stew as she drink. She wasn’t sure if she was more angry or depressed, and exactly who she was even angry with: Herself or Luke. But on her third beer, she decided the blame fell squarely on Ren. She might have said the wrong thing, but Ren had obviously done something to Luke to make him sensitive to what she said.

What was with Ren ruining another nice thing in her life? What was with him ruining everyone’s life? An impulsive (probably bad) idea swiftly overcame her as she idly looked at her phone. She had Ren’s number, she had phone signal, she could actually give him a piece of her mind. She dialed his number without another thought.

It rang four times, and just when Rey was about to hang up, Ren picked up.

“Hux. It’s three in the morning in London. This better be a real emergency or I’m going to kill you tomorrow,” he snapped in an agitated tone before she could get a word in. He sounded tired, lethargic, her call had obviously woke him up from sleep.

Rey frowned. She hadn’t considered he might be out of country. She felt sorry for him. Almost. “I don’t know who you think you are talking to, but this isn’t Hux. ”

“Who is—” his voice sounded distance, like he was pulling the phone away so he could finally look at the caller ID. When he spoke again he simply said: “It’s you again.”

It was a simple statement, there was curiosity in his voice but no aggression, and that threw her. She had to remind herself why she was calling in the first place. “You are like snake venom that destroys everything you touch.” It was a tad melodramatic, but the alcohol in her blood cheered her on and she couldn’t care less.

“Oh?” asked Ren sarcastically. “Skywalker couldn’t help you with your research like you hoped?”

“Luke Skywalker was helping me just fine before you ruined everything.”

On the other side of the line, Ren gave a humorless laugh. “Me?”

“You’ve done something to him, something that made him quit teaching.”

She could nearly hear his sneer when he replied. “Did he tell you what happened? The day when I burned his bridges with the president of MIT, did he tell you why?”

She didn’t believe what she was hearing. How could he admit to hurting his uncle’s career and sound so remorseless? Oh right, because he is a cold, unfeeling bastard who would do anything to get what he wanted. “I know everything I need to know about you.”

“You do?”

She refused to dignify the question with an answer.

“Ah, you do,” he answered in a way that sent chills down her spine.

He hung up.


	2. Chapter 2

Sleep was a miracle worker.

When she woke up, something had clicked in her brain. She slapped the ground of her camp so hard it hurt in the excitement of the moment before dashing to her car for her computer. Her fingers danced madly across the keyboard doing its best to catch up to her spinning thoughts. Her surrounding faded away in the peripherals, as she lost herself in the code, when she looked up again, it was an hour later and Luke was standing next to her.

“Still at the problem?”

“I think I’ve solved part of it,” she replied with a triumphant smile. Pride coursed through her veins at the thought of how she had done this without Luke’s help. “It’s not quite there, but I’m hopeful I will sooner or later have a working neural network that fits right on any embedded devices.”

“Do you really think creating something with such wide application is a good thing?”

The question had taken Rey aback. “Of course it is. Technology advancements infinitely improved everyone’s life.”

“Technology is romanticized, worshiped in Silicon Valley, but if you strip away all the feel good start-up stories and really think about the effect of technology on everyone’s life, you will see that it is dangerous, destructive.”

She began to protest but Luke silent her. “Technology creates robots and self driving cars that take away people’s jobs. It’s nuclear bombs and chemical weapons that allowed so many people to be killed in the World Wars. Neural networks will one day make machine smarter than any of us and who knows whose side they would be on.”

“But technology like heart pacers and CT scans extend people’s lives,” Rey, always the optimist, cut in. “It was your early neural network research that allowed us to find patterns and take preventative measures before catastrophic failures happen in planes.”

“And I became an pompous poster boy for machine learning because of that,” Luke said bitterly. “I saw Ben, my nephew with that bright Skywalker mind. And in my arrogance, I thought I could reign in his talent and ambitions, that I could make him the next big machine learning researcher.”

Luke was right there, but suddenly he seemed so far away. “Han was… Han about it, he never believed in formal education, but… Leia, she trusted me with her son. I took him in as my PhD student and I taught him. But by the time I realized where his dissertation was going and the extent of his moral ambivalence, it was too late.”

“What was he researching?” Rey asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

“A generative system to come up with new molecules,” replied Luke grimly. “My nephew always liked to play with fire.”

It took a moment for Rey to process what Luke was implying. In the wrong hands, that research could lead to chemical weapons that affects millions. Rey sucked in a heavy breath at the implication. No wonder, Luke was concerned.

“Snoke was knocking at his door with grant money, and when I confronted Ben about it, he turned on me. He uploaded our private correspondences on social media, destroyed my relationship with the school’s president, quit MIT, changed his name, and joined First Order. Leia blamed Snoke, the First Order CEO, for tempting her boy, but it was me. I failed. Because I was Luke Skywalker. Professor extraordinaire. Machine learning poster boy.”

The revelations further cemented Rey’s opinion that Ren was a sociopath and Luke’s innocence. Rey shook her head. “You didn’t fail Kylo Ren,” she told him firmly. “He failed you.”

Luke looked away and Rey sighed.

She pulled a business card from her wallet, and handed it to Luke. “I’m flying back to San Francisco tonight. If you change your mind about helping us, contact me.

* * *

She had the distinct feeling that the universe hated her when she found Ren in the seat next to hers in her connecting flight from Las Vegas to San Francisco. At the sight of him, her mind instantly jumped to everything Luke had told her earlier in the day, leaving her seething.

“I’d rather not sit next to you,” she muttered under her breath as she took her seat, not caring that he had heard her.

His gave her a weary glance. “Yeah, me too,” he returned in his low voice and turned back to his phone.

She hmphed and pulled out her laptop and put on her privacy screen, determined to ignore him for the rest of the flight by focusing on her work, but it was too hard with her conversation with Luke so fresh in her mind.

“Luke told me about what happened,” she said when she couldn’t hold in her righteous anger any longer.

Ren lifted his head and regarded her carefully. “Did he?”

His gaze was so intense she couldn’t look away even though she wanted to.

“No, he didn’t,” Ren answered his own question in a slow and deliberate way. “I spent four years of my life creating a generative system to come up with molecules that could change the world, and Luke let his fears get the better of him.”

She glared at him. “You were sharing your research with the wrong people, he tried to stop you, and you destroyed him.”

His lips twisted into an embitter sneer. “Of course, that’s what he would tell you,” he said, hot rage shone through his features though his voice remained subdued. “I was only weighing my options. I was considering Snoke’s grant offer just as I was considering the other fifteen grant offers opened to me back then.”

“The fact you would even consider taking Snoke’s money, knowing the type of application he was interested in, was irresponsible.”

Ren sucked in a resentful breath. She looked him in the eyes, daring him to contradict her, but he didn’t. Instead, he turned away and changed the subject. “I caught Skywalker sabotaging my lab results one night."

It took a few moments for Rey to fully process what he had alleged, and when she did, she felt like the air had been knocked out of her lungs.

"He had tampered with data to throw me off the right path when he thought I was close to a real finding. The integrity of the research was compromised. I couldn't trust any of my data points, who knew what else he had done while I was not looking, I threw away four years worth of post-graduate research," he explained with quiet intensity.

She stayed silent. Her mind was too full for words.

“He was supposed to be my dissertation advisor, my own family,” Ren proclaimed, and as much as Rey didn’t want to, she could hear the raw betrayal in his voice. “I let the past die, killed it if I had to. Tell me, what’s wrong with that?”

* * *

Rey groaned out loud in despair. Her day was rapidly going from bad to worse.

There were electronic issues with the engine and the plane sat at the gate for nearly two and a half hours before the pilot announced the problem couldn’t be fixed and everyone had to de-board. De-boarding was slow and painful as usual, made infinitely worse when the flight attendant at the gate announced there would be another three hours wait before the replacement plane would arrive.

Resigned to her fate, she begrudgingly looked for a seat. She as on her way to a free spot with strategic access to an outlet when someone tapped her shoulder.

It was Ren. “Want me to bring you into the lounge?”

Rey blinked at him dumbly. It took her a full second before she finally comprehended what he was offering and another for her to formulate a broken response. “Uh… You can do that?”

He shrugged nonchalantly. “I have platinum status, I can bring someone in for free.”

If he was anyone else, Rey would jump at the offer. Free food had always been, as Finn would say, her one weakness. But the man in front of her was Kylo Ren and, exhausted and hungry as she was, she couldn’t help but wonder if there were strings attached. Random acts of kindness didn’t seem like something a sociopath would do.

Ren noted her hesitation. “Take it or leave it. I don’t care,” he said with an impatient eye roll and began to walk away.

Rey made a spur of the moment decision to follow.

They walked in silence to the lounge and Ren checked them both in as promised. Rey wasn’t sure what was the social protocol when your sworn enemy helped you in an airline lounge in the middle of a long flight delay, but somehow it didn’t feel right to just go her separate ways without another word. “Thanks for bringing me in. This is much nicer than the terminal,” she said lamely.

“It’s nothing,” Ren replied dismissively. They stood together in awkward silence for few seconds before he nodded toward an empty table. “I’m going to sit down. Feel free to do whatever you'd like to do.”

She recognized that was Ren’s way of letting her know she was under no obligation to further interact with him. The most logical course of action was for her to find a table of her own and forget all about him. Yet, a quick peruse of the buffet later, her legs somehow brought her to his table.  

“Can I sit here?” she asked and motioned at the empty seat across from him.

Ren looked up from his laptop, clearly surprised, but nodded.

She sat her ham sandwich and iced tea down as he turned his head back to his laptop in a sharp, decisive move. She pulled her own laptop out onto the table like a shield and let silence stretch between them.

She found her eyes trailing to him as she bit into her sandwich. She had never took time to study his face before, but now that she did, it was impossible not to see his resemblance to Han with his wavy hair, sharp features, and dark eyes. Her heart clenched as memories of Han’s trial surfaced in her mind. “Why do you hate your father?” she asked without realizing she had spoken the question out loud.

His eyes snapped instantly to hers at her question, but he said nothing.

It was too late to stop now, so Rey continued: “You had a father who loved you. He gave a damn about you.”

“I don’t hate him.”

His answer surprised her, she hadn’t expected Ren to actually respond, let alone so honestly. She shifted in her seat and pressed on. “Then why?”

“Why what?” he demanded. “Say it.”

She swallowed as the question she had wondered but left unspoken formed into words. “Why testify against him? Why have a hand in putting your father in jail? I don’t understand.”

His eyes darkened. "You sure are defensive of him," he observed impassively.

The coldness of his voice fed the turmoil within her. She was glad it was late and there were very few people in the lounge, because she suspected she was about to make a scene. “Han was supportive of me. My parents abandoned me when I was three,” she blurted. It wasn't the most eloquent explanation but it was the only one she had.

“So, your parents threw you away like garbage and you were so desperate for a father figure you clung on to Han Solo?” he questioned harshly, cruelly. “How did that work out for you?”

He wasn’t playing fair. She was aware he was being deliberately callous to deflect her question, but that didn’t make what he said any less hurtful. She felt tears at the corner of her eyes. Her voice trembled without her permission. "Han was there for you!”

Ren laughed, the same hollow laugh he gave the other night on the phone, but not at her. “What exactly was he there for?” he asked, his caustic voice finally rising, “I saw him once a year after he and my mother divorced when I was eight. But even before then, I was always second place to his adventures, just like how I was second place to my mother’s start-ups. If I don’t hate him, it’s because I don’t know him well enough to hate him.”

It was impossible to reconcile the neglectful father Ren was describing with the caring man she knew. “Liar,” she said.

But Ren looked at her with melancholy, solemn eyes and her conviction wavered.

* * *

Han mentioned Ben Solo once.

It was summer, Leia was hosting a mid-summer Resistance BBQ party at her beach front home, and Han surprised everyone by showing up.

Rey was on her way to meet Finn and Rose at the roof top when a model of a black jet plane caught her attention because it didn’t quite fit with the rest of the décor in Leia’s home. She walked over to take a closer look out of curiosity. She had thought it was one of those plastic model kit, but on closure inspection she noticed this was one made of metal.

“That’s a SR-71 Blackbird.”

She turned around and saw Han standing behind her.

“It’s very nice," Rey commented. She had taken metalwork as an elective in high school and she could tell by the workmanship that the plane was a labor of love. "How long did it take to make?" 

"Two years, on and off."

"Did you make it alone?”

His eyes drifted far away as a fond but wistful smile graced his usually harden lips. “No, I made it with Ben.”

* * *

Rey buried herself with work, first with a debrief meeting with Poe, then with a knowledge transfer meeting with Finn and Rose on what she had learned from Luke, and finally with catching up on the two hundred plus e-mails she had missed while she was at Colorado. Somehow, none of that was enough to shake Kylo (she had started calling him Kylo) out of her mind.

Leia stopped her on her way to the lunchroom and asked about her trip. She looked as in control and dignified as usual, but Rey saw the weariness and worry at the corner of her eyes. She was desperate for some good news, Rey realized, just like everyone else, so she focused her report on the ideas she had gotten since her meeting with Luke.

That earned her a smile from Leia, but the smile never reached the older woman's eyes. "How was Luke?"

The question made Rey wonder when Leia last saw her brother. She suspected the timing coincided with Luke's fallout with his nephew. "He seemed well enough, but alone."

Leia nodded slowly. 

Rey had so many questions she wanted to ask, but she wasn't sure where to start, nor how to bring up an estranged son, so she excused herself and Leia let her go.

* * *

Rey ran into Kylo Ren the day First Order's plans to acquire Resistance came to light three months ago. He was alone and on his way out after a meeting with investors. She wasn’t planning to go anywhere, but when she saw him enter an elevator, she followed him in.

“You!” she cried, the moment the elevator door slammed shut. She was so furious at the news, she hit the elevator wall hard enough to hurt her hand. “You just couldn’t leave Leia’s work alone, could you?”

He stood where he was and watched her, with a hint of mild curiosity. When he spoke, his voice was even and a little detached. “This is business not personal. The strategy team did cost benefits analysis on startups with IPs I was interested in, and Resistance just happened to come out on top.”

She had readied herself to be, as Finn called it, “Renned”. She knew Kylo’s temper and she had seen with her own eyes how he took down critics of his work. His calm response shocked her but it only took a moment for her rage to return.   

She narrowed her eyes. “You made sure it would come out on top by pushing for Han’s conviction.”

“The analysis was done before Han was arrested. The acquisition plan would have moved forward regardless.”

Rey knew better than to buy the explanation. “No. This is part of your twisted mission to destroy your parents’ legacy! First Han, and now Leia!”

He flinched, ever so slightly, at Leia’s name, and looked away. And for a moment, Rey wondered if she had crossed a line. Then, his features hardened, and finally, the expected backlash came: “Maybe if Resistance was better managed and actually made money for the investors, First Order wouldn’t have the opportunity to acquire it. It’s not my issue it’s run by a bunch of amateurs like you.”

“Amateurs? I’m not the one who has to steal IP from other companies because you can’t develop your own.”

Frustration flashed across his features, but oddly, he didn’t rise to anger.

His lips twist into something not quite a smile. “No, but you’re the one who convinced me Resistance has something worthwhile to take.”

The words felt too uncomfortably close to a compliment.

They fell silent.

* * *

It was her mid-afternoon coffee break, her conversation with Kylo was looping in her head even as she listened to Finn talk about his weekend plans with Poe. 

She wished she could just brush his words off as untruths, but the more she thought about what he had said, the less she was sure of anything. It was driving her mad.

While Finn ordered his coffee, a sudden realization hit her: She still had Luke's e-mail address.

She pulled out her phone and typed a message out of self-preservation:

 

> _Luke,_
> 
> _Did you create Kylo Ren? Tell me the truth._

Impulsively, always impulsively, she pressed send.  

* * *

She didn’t receive a response from Luke, but she did receive a text from his nephew two days later.

 

> _How's your neural network problem coming along? [7:37pm]_

His message should probably shock her more than it did, but the past week had prepared her for stranger things. 

 

> _Well. Sorry to disappoint you. [7:40pm]_
> 
> _Why do you care? [7:41pm]_
> 
> _I don't. [7:43pm]_

> _But, if you need help, let me know. [7:45pm]_

She put down her phone, but when Kylo's messages popped up in her alert, her phone was instantly back in her hands again. Truth to be told, she could use some help, not step-by-step instructions, but workable ideas. She had made progress since her visit with Luke but not nearly enough to make her feel comfortable. Sometime between the delayed flight and the present, Kylo had graduated in her mind from an evil overlord to an actual human being, and that made the thought of receiving his help much less repulsive.

Still, she didn’t understand why he was offering to help her at all—It was counterproductive to the First Order, to his, cause—it made no sense.

 

> _Why would you do that? [7:46pm]_

It was a good ten minutes later before Kylo supplied a response:

 

> _I wonder why myself. [7:56pm]_

It wasn't an answer, but Rey decided to stop speculating his motives. She sent him the link to her Stack Overflow question. The question was generalized enough to not give away any trade secrets, but directed enough that if Kylo really wanted to, he could take the answer deep enough to solve a big piece of her remaining problem. It felt like the right thing to do, even if her friends at Resistance may protest if they realized what she had just done.

That night, she added ‘Kylo’ to her contact list.

* * *

It felt like fate when she saw Kylo at a coffee shop on Saturday.

He was facing away, waiting for his coffee when she arrived. She hesitated, but she approached him after she had placed her order.

“Kylo.”

He spun around, and when his eyes met hers, his lips tilted into a small smile. It dawned on her how she had never seen him smile before, and she found herself thinking how nice it looked on him. “Rey.”

“Do you frequent this coffee shop?”

He nodded. “I live close by. You?”

“First time, actually. I had an appointment at my old orphanage and I just happened to pass by.”

It was meant to be an off-handed comment, but Kylo inexplicably froze at her words. When she looked at him to try to figure out what was wrong, he looked away. “The other day, I shouldn’t have said what I did.” When he saw Rey’s confusion, he clarified: “I’d made a cruel comment about your parents.”

_Your parents threw you away like garbage._

It was a cruel comment, but it was also true, and she had almost forgotten about it before he had brought it up. The throb she had suppressed since her visit at the orphanage throbbed anew. She was glad when the barista interrupted the moment by calling her name. She stepped away to get her coffee.

“It’s alright,” she managed to say levelly when she returned.

He shook his head. “It wasn't. I acted out. I wasn't used to anyone digging at my past,” he admitted quietly. “And if I’m honest with myself, I was envious.”

She stared at him. “Envious?”

Kylo closed his eyes and let out a long sigh.

“That you have a better relationship with my father than I ever had.”

Beneath his fatigue resignation, she recognized loneliness and longing for a family that was akin to her own. She felt her chest tightened. Looking at him felt too much like looking within herself.

She suddenly felt the compulsion to make a confession of her own: “I made my appointment with the orphanage today hoping they would have records on my parents. I thought I’d find answers there, but I was wrong. And I never felt more alone.”

He took a slow and measured step toward her and caught her eyes.

“You're not alone.”

She held his gaze and told him: “Neither are you."

* * *

She found a message from Kylo on her phone when she woke on Monday morning telling her he had left an answer on Stack Overflow for her. The message was sent at 4:14am. She wondered if he was overseas again or he had actually lost sleep working through her question. Either way, she was grateful.

She sipped her morning coffee as she logged into her Stack Exchange account on her phone. A single response to her question was waiting for her as he had promised. It was so long and detailed and logically laid out, it was more than she had expected and yet everything she had expected all at the same time. It took her nearly thirty minutes to read-through all the text and code snippets, and by the end of it all, her mind was racing with so many new ideas she was shaking in excitement.

She was about to get her laptop when she noticed, at the bottom of his answer, his username: _SoloCodeTechnican_

Her coffee mug fell out of her hand.

* * *

There was a time in her life when she was less sure about her place in the universe, when she was a confused and scared undergrad meandering her way through her general science degree.

Then, one day, she received a rude but lengthy response to an answer she left on Stack Overflow. The comment infuriated her so much, she spent hours researching machine learning techniques just so she so she could nit pick at his response.  The resulting back and forth (first public, and then private when the moderators locked their thread) with SoloCodeTechnician forwarded her understanding of neural network, deep learning, and general computer science concepts so much, she decided to switch her major to computer science at the end of her third semester.

She didn’t know who this person was, they never shared personal information, even though for a year and three months he always at the forefront of her mind. Then, as suddenly as he came into her life, he disappeared.

* * *

It was only 7:45am, but she called him anyway because she couldn’t wait another moment.

“I didn’t know you were _SoloCodeTechnician_ ,” she let out the moment the call connected.

“I didn’t know you were _Binary.Scavenger_ either,” he replied. There was sleep in his voice, but he didn’t sound too unhappy about being woken up.

“I hope you found the answer helpful.”

She didn’t know if she wanted to cry or laugh or something in between. He was still the chief of R&D at First Order responsible for the Resistance acquisition, and she was still the lead developer at Resistance working overtime to create a prototype that would starve the investors’ appetite for the said acquisition. But now, illogically, maddeningly, it was clear to her that they were also becoming friends.

"It was very helpful," she assured him.

When she called his name, the name that left her lips was: Ben.

**Author's Note:**

> Yay I wrote a Star Wars / modern AU fic! 
> 
> Big thanks to Viv for beta-ing the story and my nerdy darling for feeding me machine learning terms. I am half considering expanding this one day. But for now, this is complete.
> 
> I hope you liked the story!


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